Flowers for St Valentine's Day

A third century Roman martyr whose date and place of death we know yet nothing else seems strangely appropriate for a day devoted to love whose reality is just so, and yet remains an endlessly unfathomed mystery!

For flowers, I thought this painting by Winifred Nicholson: two pots of honeysuckle and sweet pea, both standing apart, as themselves, and yet also together, tendrils reaching out, offering to entwine. And loved for themselves - for their colour, radiance, life - and yet, paradoxically, as soon picked, transient, passing away.

Yet, as with all of Nicholson's art, the suggestion that each and every particular thing dwells in yet something other. Transience dances across a field in eternity. Every loved moment rests in a memory everlasting.

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